Green Plan Summary

Summary

This Green Plan sets out the intentions of Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust (NGH) to reduce its environmental impact in line with the Greener NHS Strategy, annual standard contract requirements, and the NHS Long Term Plan. A second plan will be produced to cover in more detail the requirements to decarbonise the direct emissions from NGH to reach net zero by 2040. This Green Plan covers the period up until March 2025. It has been approved by a multidisciplinary Sustainable Development Committee and the Trust Board, and it will be incorporated in the local ICS Green Plan. With the creation of the University Hospitals of Northamptonshire Group, therefore a joint Sustainability Strategy will be produced in the next 18 months.

Northampton General Hospital has the following broad aspirations within its Green Plan:

• Reduce our scope 1 and 2 carbon emissions in line with the Net Zero 2040 target
• Improve our resource efficiency
• Reduce air pollution from trust operations
• Embed wider social value aspirations within our operations
• Ensure our staff are more informed about the environmental impact of healthcare and that are premises and care patterns are prepared to deal with a changing climate
• Adapt our models of care to low carbon pathways and utilise new innovations and digital solutions

We have included a number of targets and KPIs within the sections of the plan. Due to the impact of Covid-19 on the operations of the hospital for the full year of 2020/21 all targets will be against a benchmark of 2019/20 data unless otherwise stated.

This Green Plan forms our underlying Sustainability Strategy, but includes a number of actions that we aim to achieve over the next three years. Some of these actions will be embedded as business as usual and therefore have no completion date. These are labelled as ongoing within the action plan tables.

Actions and progress will be included on a dashboard to be developed on the Trust’s intranet pages visible to all staff.

Sustainability is also included in the Group’s Dedicated to Excellence Strategy; the targets from that strategy are incorporated into this Green Plan.